Can you write a history of the year 1913 and ignore the disaster waiting around the corner? With the centenary of the first world war approaching that may sound perverse, yet it is precisely what Die Zeit journalist Florian Illies tries to do in his new book, which was a bestseller in Germany when it was published there last year.

In 1913: The Year Before the Storm, Illies tells the story of that year through a series of snapshots from the lives of artists, scientists, inventors and politicians, relayed with a novelist's eye for detail and a liveblogger's sense of urgency. He also tries to write the teleology out of early 20th-century history. There's more on Kaiser Wilhelm's passion for stag-hunting than on the consequences of the Reichstag bill to increase military spending. Nothing about Italy's imperial extension into Libya; a few sentences only on the second Balkan war. Illies writes that "Austro-Hungary doesn't have a chance against the attack from the French." But he's writing about tennis: Frenchman Max Decugis beats Austrian Ludwig Salm in three sets in the final of a Madrid tournament that April.

Far from teetering on the edge of the abyss, the generation of 1913 looks surprisingly carefree. Labour politician Norman Angell has a bestseller in Germany with The Great Illusion, in which he argues that "the Great War, that eternal threat, will never come" because countries are too economically interlinked (90 years later, that same argument is known as the "golden arches theory" because two countries with a McDonald's will never attack one another). In Britain in 1913, people read the The Triumph of Life by German biologist Wilhelm Bölsche, who turns Darwin's notion of evolutionary struggle on its head and argues that human beings are getting on marvellously.

A few broodier minds are already thinking about war, but Illies is keen to expose their vanity. Thomas Mann, who in March is earnestly harking back to the Franco-Prussian war as "a moral cleansing, a grandiose stride of life's seriousness beyond all sentimental confusions", spends most of the year chewing over a devastating review of his first play and obsessing about whether he got ripped off for the new rug in his study.Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West pops up repeatedly only to be exposed as a fatalist who confuses his own hang-ups about women with a wider crisis in European civilisation. Coming from a generation that has done so much to document the sins of those who allowed the second world war to happen, why is Illies so eager to let the first world war generation off the hook?

Back in 2000, when he was 28, Illies had another bestseller with a book called Generation Golf: a wry look at his contemporaries who had grown up in the 1980s, who were both less rebellious and more status-orientated than their parents. They celebrated style over substance and hailed the political middle ground: "Choosing between a green and a blue Barbour jacket was a more important choice for us than voting Christian Democrat or Social Democrat."

While Illies's book was critical of his generation, many also felt it spoke their language all too well: the postmodern game of brand semiotics, the clever-clever blurring of high culture and low entertainment, the acceptance that this was a book written for the market rather than the critics. Generation Golf was not only named after an advertising slogan, but audaciously ended with Illies thanking not only his literary agent but Helmut Kohl, the notoriously dour Christian Democrat chancellor.

A few months after Generation Golf was published, the planes hit the twin towers and put an end to the end of history. In a two-way interview published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung two years later, 73-year-old veteran political journalist Günter Gaus told Illies that "your Generation Golf reminds me of the generation who in 1914, after a long, long period of peace, was desperate for the first world war's storm of steel. You are both tired of your own luxury." It's hard not to think of 1913 as a riposte to that jibe: an attempt to rescue the pre-war generation from their lemming-like reputation.

Illies may have retained some of the blindspots of his earlier work. He gives plenty of space to the chance encounters of Europe's cultural elite – Freud, Hofmannsthal and Rilke bumping into each other in Munich's Englischer Garten, Joyce giving English lessons to Italo Svevo in Trieste – but we find out little about what was happening in the coffee houses of Algiers, Bombay or Constantinople. That would sound like a big ask had Charles Emmerson not managed to write just such an international account, published earlier this year.

But Illies has also broadened his range. He is, it turns out, as astute a researcher as he is an observer of the zeitgeist: the section on Arnold Schönberg – who was so superstitious about the number 13 that he deliberately misspelled the title of his opera Moses and Aron so it only has 12 letters, but ended up dying on a Friday 13th – reads like something out of a magic realist novel.

The book works best when it zooms in on the lives of artists hovering somewhere between hypochondria and hyperactivity. The affair between Gustav Mahler's widow Alma and the ragingly possessive painter Oskar Kokoschka is as gripping as Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer's is desperately sad. Both of these stories have been told before, but rarely with such directness.

Kafka christened the 1910s "the nervous era", and if there is one thing that unites the different characters in this book, it's a state of heightened anxiety. The historical fatalists, the Spenglers of this world, would have diagnosed a chronic disease in need of a radical cure. But Illies notes that neurasthenia, or "nervous exhaustion", may have been little more than love sickness, and cheerily adds that 1913 was also the year in whi

ch the drug ecstasy was invented: another bridge between the pre-war generation and his own.